As it turned out, the establishment was a real nasty little dive halfway down a real nasty little alley in a real nasty little part of town not too awfully far from the French Quarter. Not that Claire usually minded real nasty little dives down real nasty little alleys. She’d been in more than a few such places on official business. And she’d been in a few having some fun, too, and nearly always came out alive and kicking. Usually, however, at such times, she was more apt to be hauling off to jail some brutal, drunken guy who had used his wife as a punching bag and called it sport. Zee had told her that he rather enjoyed rousting wife batterers, too, especially if he got to subdue the guy with a baton. But he only did that if absolutely necessary, of course. Sometimes, though, after seeing such a man’s beaten and bloody wife, lying on her couch with an ice bag on her lumps and bruises and two black eyes swollen shut, he tended to really, really want to teach the guy a lesson. But he was a good cop; she’d found that nobody walked a straighter line than Zee did.
